News

Mean annual temperature (top), annual precipitation (middle) and combined (bottom) models of habitability, showing the percentage of time intervals that remain within the climatic range of the occupations from each Marine Isotope Stage. From the paper

A spatiotemporally explicit paleoenvironmental framework for the Middle Stone Age of eastern Africa

7 March 2022

Andrea took part in a paper just published in Scientific Reports in which they use paleoclimate to find out which habitats were inhabited during the Middle Stone Age in eastern Africa. Lucy Timbrell, Matt Grove, Andrea Manica, Stephen Rucina, James Blinkhorn (2022) A spatiotemporally explicit paleoenvironmental framework...

Mammoth skeleton from the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. Photo by Kansas Sebastian on Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Process-explicit models reveal pathway to extinction for woolly mammoth using pattern-oriented validation

7 November 2021

Andrea took part in a paper just out in Ecology Letters investigating the processes leading to the extinction of the woolly mammoths. Damien A. Fordham, Stuart C. Brown, H. Reşit Akçakaya, Barry W. Brook, Sean Haythorne, Andrea Manica, Kevin T. Shoemaker, Jeremy J. Austin, Benjamin Blonder, Julia Pilowsky, Carsten Rahbek...

African leopard. Credit: Pixabay from pexels

African and Asian leopards are highly differentiated at the genomic level

5 November 2021

It is now out in Current Biology Andrea's new paper characterising the level of genetic diversity and inferring the genetic history of African and Asian leopards. Johanna L.A. Paijmans, Axel Barlow, Matthew S. Becker, James A. Cahill, Joerns Fickel, Daniel W.G. Förster, Katrin Gries, Stefanie Hartmann, Rasmus Worsøe...

Map of the 20 Middle and Late Pleistocene terrestrial climate proxies used in the study and their respective time series. From Krapp et al. 2021

High-resolution global terrestrial climate for the last 800,000 years

27 August 2021

Mario, Robert and Andrea just published in Scientific Data a high-resolution palaeoclimatic dataset for the last 800,000 years. In the right column, there is the link to the data. Mario Krapp, Robert M. Beyer, Stephen L. Edmundson, Paul J. Valdes, Andrea Manica (2021) A statistics-based reconstruction of high-resolution...

Rain in a forest. Picture by brazil topno from pexels

Climatic windows for human migration out of Africa in the past 300,000 years

25 August 2021

Is now out in Nature Communications our new paper that estimates when, and along which geographic paths, expansions out of Africa would have been climatically feasible. Robert M. Beyer, Mario Krapp, Anders Eriksson, Andrea Manica (2021) Climatic windows for human migration out of Africa in the past 300,000 years Nat Commun...

Geographic distribution of samples included in the dataset. From the paper

A curated dataset of modern and ancient high-coverage shotgun human genomes

5 August 2021

It is now out in Scientific data the paper describing our curated dataset of 35 whole-genome sequenced samples, previously published, together with the genetic pipeline used to process them. The link to download both the data and the pipeline is in the right column. Pierpaolo Maisano Delser, Eppie R. Jones, Anahit...

Webinar: The impact of climate on the human niche through time

20 July 2021

Andrea took part in this year’s seminar series by The Max Plank Institute for the Science of Human History: The past, present and future of the human niche. The video is available below.

Pleistocenic fossils from the genus Homo. Credit: Manuel Will

Climate shaped the body and brain size evolution in the genus Homo

9 July 2021

It just came out in Nature Communications our new paper studying how climate drove the evolution of body and brain size in the genus Homo during the last million years. Manuel Will, Mario Krapp, Jay T. Stock, Andrea Manica (2021) Different environmental variables predict body and brain size evolution in Homo Nature...

Helicobacter pylori. Credit: Penn state on Flickr. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Human colonisation of the Americas: a tale of bacteria

23 June 2021

Andrea took part in a paper just published in PNAS that, through the analysis of the genetic diversity in Helicobacter pylori , reconstructs the human peopling of Siberia and America. Yoshan Moodley, Andrea Brunelli, Silvia Ghirotto, Andrey Klyubin, Ayas S. Maady, William Tyne, Zilia Y. Muñoz-Ramirez, Zhemin Zhou, Andrea...

DNA alignment. Picture by Michela Leonardi

mtDNAcombine: tools to combine sequences from multiple studies

10 March 2021

It is now out in BMC Bioinformatics the paper describing mtDNAcombine , an R package to combine mitochondrial sequences from multiple studies. In the right column are linked a few resources to familiarise with it. Eleanor F. Miller, Andrea Manica (2021) mtDNAcombine: tools to combine sequences from multiple studies BMC...

A spatiotemporally explicit paleoenvironmental framework for the Middle Stone Age of eastern Africa

Process-explicit models reveal pathway to extinction for woolly mammoth using pattern-oriented validation

African and Asian leopards are highly differentiated at the genomic level

High-resolution global terrestrial climate for the last 800,000 years

Climatic windows for human migration out of Africa in the past 300,000 years

A curated dataset of modern and ancient high-coverage shotgun human genomes

Webinar: The impact of climate on the human niche through time

Climate shaped the body and brain size evolution in the genus Homo

Human colonisation of the Americas: a tale of bacteria

mtDNAcombine: tools to combine sequences from multiple studies

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